The irony is that for all its obscurity, most startups are using at least one mission critical service that runs on elixir -- slab, pagerduty, elixir, ramp, divvy, discord. brex is probably still half ish elixir, though they claimed to be wanting to replace it with kotlin when they got some new tech leadership. I wonder how that's going. I remember working at a startup where the cto was unsure about putting trust in elixir, claiming it was an "unproven entity". I pointed out to him we used THREE of those services, do if he didn't trust elixir we should probably pivot off of those products.

I doubt the reservation is with the language/runtime itself, especially with elixir and the BEAM. More likely, it’s with the maturity of the community. Especially at a small startup, building on elixir even today might still mean having to build things in house you may not in Django/Rails/JS.

Indeed. This was covered later in the article on characteristics that may alter the perception of a high-leverage toolchain…

More good & relevant information + libraries -> more acceptance (i.e. my use case is no longer a tech uncertainty)

The other thought would be that if you didn’t have to do anything yourself then you must have no moat.

The moat comment depends on the company, not all or even most businesses depend on actual innovation as their moat.

Also, I think we’re agreeing here, but there are a huge set of things that you may need to build an application that aren’t the core value prop of your company. Buying into a more mature ecosystem makes it more likely that you don’t have to build those things and can spend more time on the moat stuff.

Indeed, I think you are quite right, and we are in agreement.

Phoenix exists, so I don’t think that’s true.

I think you are overestimating the intelligence of that CTO

It's only obscure professionally; it's also one of the most loved languages. [same survey]

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and...

I was surprised to see how low it is on the Want list, even though it's only second to Rust in the Love list.

Simply put, many developers don't yet know they're gonna love it!